Comparison
AxonQA vs building it yourself
The most common alternative to AxonQA is not another product. It is Playwright, a spreadsheet, and your own CI. That combination is free, powerful, and for some teams it is the right answer. This page is about when it stops being the right answer.
The short answer
Writing your own tests is not the wrong choice. The tooling is excellent and free, and an engineer who knows the product will write better tests than any generator on the first pass.
What tends to go wrong is not the writing. It is the second year. The interface moves and a few tests break. Nobody owns fixing them, because it is nobody’s actual job. The suite goes amber, then people stop trusting it, then people stop running it. Meanwhile the manual side lives in a spreadsheet that nobody has opened since March, and coverage is a number somebody estimates in a meeting.
AxonQA is for the point where that has happened, or where you can see it coming and would rather not staff around it.
Side by side
What each one actually costs you
Not a feature count. What it takes to keep the thing alive.
| What you need | Building it yourself | AxonQA |
|---|---|---|
| Getting the first test running | Free, and a capable engineer has one running in an afternoon. | Every paid workspace opens on a worked sample project. |
| Writing the tests | You write them. Full control, and exactly the tests you meant. | Generated from your requirements, or from the real pages and controls captured in your app. Edit them if you want to, not because you have to. |
| Running them | Your own CI, which you configure, pay for and maintain. | Runs them. Cloud, or a local agent for private applications. |
| Operating the QA workflow | You can automate as much as you choose, but you design and maintain every connection between the tools. | Axon AI can organise work, create and run UI and API checks, investigate failures, update trackers, and report back from one conversation. |
| When the interface moves | Someone rewrites the selectors. Usually the person who wrote them. | Repairs locator drift while the run is still going, and never changes what the test expects, so a repair cannot turn a real failure green. |
| Manual testing | A spreadsheet, which goes stale within about two sprints. | Plans, phases, ownership and sign-off, in the same project as the automation. |
| Knowing your coverage | An estimate. Nothing connects the tests to the requirements. | One number across manual and automated work, against a target you set. |
| Bugs from failures | Someone retypes the reproduction steps into Jira, if they have time. | Filed with the steps and the recording attached, and the status syncs back. |
| The release decision | Judgement, from a CI dashboard and whatever you remember. | Checks the release conditions you set and returns one of three verdicts. |
| Who owns it | Whoever wrote it. The context leaves when they do. | The workspace holds it. Onboarding somebody is reading, not archaeology. |
| What it costs | The tools are free. The maintenance is engineering time you are already short of. | Published pricing from £69 a month, with no sales call for Pro or Team. |
The difference that matters
The tests were never the expensive part.
Writing a test suite is a weekend. Keeping one trustworthy for two years, while the product changes underneath it, is a job. At a company of thirty people that job usually belongs to nobody, which means it gets done in the gaps until it does not get done at all.
The honest arithmetic is against a hire rather than against a tool. A QA engineer in the UK starts around £45,000 before employer costs. A contractor costs more per day, leaves with the context, and is not there on release day. Compared with either of those, a subscription that runs the tests, repairs them, tracks the manual passes and produces a defensible answer is a straightforward decision. Compared with a free framework and an engineer who genuinely owns it, it is not, and we would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
Where it fits
It works whether or not you already have people testing
Same product and the same question. What changes is where you are starting from.
If you already have engineers writing tests
- Your engineer stops rewriting selectors every time the interface moves, and gets that time back for the product.
- The manual passes, the API checks and the open bugs join the automation in one place, so coverage is one number rather than an estimate.
- A failed run becomes a bug with the reproduction steps and the recording already attached, instead of a message in a channel.
- Release day ends in a verdict you can put in front of a stakeholder, not a green dashboard somebody still has to interpret.
If nobody owns quality yet
- You get a QA process without hiring for one: cases, plans, phases, ownership and sign-off.
- Axon AI explores the app and drafts tests from what it finds, so you are not starting from a blank page.
- Tests run on a schedule and on demand, and repair themselves when the interface moves rather than when someone finds time.
- The pre-release check ends in an answer you can show someone, rather than a feeling.
Where we are genuinely not the answer: you need a fully on-premise deployment, a framework we do not generate, or a certification we do not hold yet. Those are real gaps, and we would rather say so before you buy than after you have committed.
Bring what you already have.
Bring the test cases you have as an Excel or CSV import, start from a Jira or Azure DevOps ticket, record a flow in the browser, or point AxonQA at the app and let it draft cases from what it finds. Any one of those works on its own, and none of them require you to have a suite already.
We write the tests. You own them. Test cases, runs and reports export to Excel, CSV or JSON whenever you want them, and if you ever move on we will package up your automation and hand it over. Nothing here is locked to a format only we can read.
Where we are today: we run an information security management system, approved in August 2026, with a statement of applicability across all 93 Annex A controls, a risk register of 23 scored risks and a policy set we can share. All 33 SOC 2 Common Criteria are mapped to the controls that satisfy them, with zero gaps and every partial one named. We hold no ISO 27001 certificate and no SOC 2 report, no auditor has been engaged, and single sign-on is next up rather than shipped. If any of that is a hard gate for your procurement today, we will say so on the first call rather than let you find out in a security review three weeks in.
Comparing against a tool instead? See all comparisons
See where your app actually stands.
Choose a plan, point it at your product, and get a coverage number and a verdict without writing a suite first.